Industry Oriented MBA Program

Looking at the current job scenario where every organization in India today is facing a talent crunch in spite of us producing thousands of MBAs every year, I feel there is a lot of disconnect between what a MBA should deliver to a student and what it actually delivers.

Most of the B and C category MBA Institutes today are focussing on traditional specializations like marketing, systems, operations, finance etc. This traditional system classifies the real world into silos which do not have many linkages to each other. But if you see what is happening in the real world, we end up performing roles spanning multiple functions. There is a need to be multi-skilled and having exposure to multiple disciplines like Sales, Customer Service, Human Resources, Finance, IT et al.

Sales has become a part of everyone’s job, especially in the functions where there is a customer interface. It is more prevalent in the Banking and Insurance Industry where cross sell has become the mantra and we see a lot of new companies launching business which would earn its revenue from selling financial products of other companies.

Will a MBA in Finance in the traditional sense help here. I don’t think so. What is required in an industry like Banking is a strong skill-set focusing on communication, networking skills, negotiation skills and etiquette. But do such subjects form part of our regular MBA curriculum? The answer is that very few institutes provide such courses and very few students opt for the same wherever they are provided. Why? Because students are not aware of the need of such courses which are to their mind trivial electives and a waste of time.

There is a need today to impart managerial skills to students in a MBA program – abilities in the area of problem solving, communication, negotiation, people management, networking, working with ambiguity, creative thinking, working in teams etc are the ones we need to focus on apart from the subject knowledge.

Most of the things we study in our MBA courses are not used right after MBA. They are used once we reach at levels where we can make a decision to change things a bit. In the formative years post MBA, we end up doing the basic stuff and all this requires the skills I mentioned above and not the knowledge of management theories.

By focussing on development of these skills, the MBA institutes will make their students more employable and more Industry oriented.Like I had mentioned in my earlier post that the campuses also need to manage the expectations of their students and bring them down to realistic levels to ensure that there is a good fit between the company and the candidate.